Items Tagged: flash+storage

I am impressed with the professionalism of your staff. The questions [in the interview] were well thought out and addressed the specifics of my answers to the survey questions. I found your team to be well prepared and sufficiently well versed in the technologies we are planning to employ to make the interview comfortable and very pleasant.

Astute Networks™, Inc., the leading provider of performance storage appliances, today announced the expansion of the ViSX family of Performance Storage Appliances with enterprise-class data protection and a new MLC flash offering that will be particularly attractive to the small to medium enterprise (SME) and small-to-medium business (SMB) markets.

Kaminario, the leader in scale-out Flash storage,today announced the release of its fourth-generation K2 all-Flash storage array. The K2 v4 delivers unparalleled performance consistency and resiliency to midrange enterprises in a much smaller, denser, greener and lower-priced configuration. Built to meet the growing demand for Solid State (SSD) Flash storage, the K2 v4 is based on the proven SPEAR Scale-out Architecture, the only Flash storage architecture that can deliver consistent and predictable performance for general purpose, mixed workload environments with enterprise-class resiliency and data protection.

Nutanix Inc. today expanded its line of converged storage systems by launching an entry-level platform for small enterprises and branch offices, and a data center platform that handles more data-intensive applications than its earlier systems.

Enterprise Flash - Scalable, Smart, and Economical

There is a serious re-hosting effort going on in data center storage as flash-filled systems replace large arrays of older spinning disks for tier 1 apps. Naturally as costs drop and the performance advantages of flash-accelerated IO services become irresistible, they also begin pulling in a widening circle of applications with varying QoS needs. Yet this extension leads to a wasteful tug-of-war between high-end flash only systems that can’t effectively serve a wide variety of application workloads and so-called hybrid solutions originally architected for HDDs that are often challenged to provide the highest performance required by those tier 1 applications.

Someday in its purest form all-flash storage theoretically could drop in price enough to outright replace all other storage tiers even at the largest capacities, although that is certainly not true today. Here at Taneja Group we think storage tiering will always offer a better way to deliver varying levels of QoS by balancing the latest in performance advances appropriately with the most efficient capacities. In any case, the best enterprise storage solutions today need to offer a range of storage tiers, often even when catering to a single application’s varying storage needs.

There are many entrants in the flash storage market, with the big vendors now rolling out enterprise solutions upgraded for flash. Unfortunately many of these systems are shallow retreads of older architectures, perhaps souped-up a bit to better handle some hybrid flash acceleration but not able to take full advantage of it. Or they are new dedicated flash-only point products with big price tags, immature or minimal data services, and limited ability to scale out or serve a wider set of data center QoS needs.

Oracle saw an opportunity for a new type of cost-effective flash-speed storage system that could meet the varied QoS needs of multiple enterprise data center applications – in other words, to take flash storage into the mainstream of the data center. Oracle decided they had enough storage chops (from Exadata, ZFS, Pillar, Sun, etc.) to design and build a “flash-first” enterprise system intended to take full advantage of flash as a performance tier, but also incorporate other storage tiers naturally including slower “capacity” flash, performance HDD, and capacity HDD. Tiering by itself isn’t a new thing – all the hybrid solutions do it and there are other vendor solutions that were designed for tiering – but Oracle built the FS1 Flash Storage System from the fast “flash” tier down, not by adding flash to a slower or existing HDD-based architecture working “upwards.” This required designing intelligent automated management to take advantage of flash for performance while leveraging HDD to balance out cost. This new architecture has internal communication links dedicated to flash media with separate IO paths for HDDs, unlike traditional hybrids that might rely solely on their older, standard HDD-era architectures that can internally constrain high-performance flash access.

Oracle FS1 is a highly engineered SAN storage system with key capabilities that set it apart from other all-flash storage systems, including built in QoS management that incorporates business priorities, best-practices provisioning, and a storage alignment capability that is application aware – for Oracle Database naturally, but that can also address a growing body of other key enterprise applications (such as Oracle JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, Siebel, MS Exchange/SQL Server, and SAP) – and a “service provider” capability to carve out multi-tenant virtual storage “domains” while online that are actually enforced at the hardware partitioning level for top data security isolation.

In this report, we’ll dive in and examine some of the great new capabilities of the Oracle FS1. We’ll look at what really sets it apart from the competition in terms of its QoS, auto-tiering, co-engineering with Oracle Database and applications, delivered performance, capacity scaling and optimization, enterprise availability, and OPEX reducing features, all at a competitive price point that will challenge the rest of the increasingly flash-centric market.

Flash technology has burst on the IT scene within the past few years with a vengeance. Initially seen simply as a replacement for HDDs, flash now is triggering IT and business to rethink a lot of practices that have been well established for decades. One of those is data protection. Do you protect data the same way when it is sitting on flash as you did when HDDs ruled the day? How do you take into account that at raw cost/capacity levels, flash is still more expensive than HDDs? Do data deduplication and compression technologies change how you work with flash? Does the fact that flash technology is injected most often to alleviate severe application performance issues require you to rethink how you should protect, manage, and move this data?

These questions apply across the board when flash is injected into storage arrays but even more so when you consider all-flash arrays (AFAs), which are often associated with the most mission-critical applications an enterprise possesses. The expectations for application service levels and data protection recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) are vastly different in these environments. Given this, are existing data protection tools adequate? Or is there a better way to utilize these expensive assets and yet achieve far superior results? The short answer is yes to both.

In this Opinion piece we will focus on answering these questions broadly through the data protection lens. We will then look at a specific case of how data protection can be designed with flash in mind by considering the combination of flash-optimized HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage, HPE StoreOnce System backup appliances, and HPE Recovery Management Central (RMC) software. These elements combine to produce an exceptional solution that meets the stringent application service requirements and data protection RTOs and RPOs that one finds in flash storage environments while keeping costs in check.

Flash technology has burst on the IT scene within the past few years with a vengeance. Initially seen simply as a replacement for HDDs, flash now is triggering IT and business to rethink a lot of practices that have been well established for decades. One of those is data protection. Do you protect data the same way when it is sitting on flash as you did when HDDs ruled the day? How do you take into account that at raw cost/capacity levels, flash is still more expensive than HDDs? Do data deduplication and compression technologies change how you work with flash? Does the fact that flash technology is injected most often to alleviate severe application performance issues require you to rethink how you should protect, manage, and move this data?

These questions apply across the board when flash is injected into storage arrays but even more so when you consider all-flash arrays (AFAs), which are often associated with the most mission-critical applications an enterprise possesses. The expectations for application service levels and data protection recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) are vastly different in these environments. Given this, are existing data protection tools adequate? Or is there a better way to utilize these expensive assets and yet achieve far superior results? The short answer is yes to both.

In this Opinion piece we will focus on answering these questions broadly through the data protection lens. We will then look at a specific case of how data protection can be designed with flash in mind by considering the combination of flash-optimized HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage, HP StoreOnce System backup appliances, and HP StoreOnce Recovery Management Central (RMC) software. These elements combine to produce an exceptional solution that meets the stringent application service requirements and data protection RTOs and RPOs that one finds in flash storage environments while keeping costs in check.

The Mainstream Adoption of All-Flash Storage: HPE Customers Show How Everyone Can Leverage Flash

Flash storage offers higher performance, lower power consumption, decreased footprint and increased reliability over spinning media. It would be the rare IT shop today that doesn’t have some flash acceleration deployed in performance hot spots. But many IT folks are still on the sidelines watching and waiting for the right time to jump into a bigger adoption of flash-based shared storage.

When will flash costs (CAPEX) drop to make it affordable to switch – and for which workloads does all-flash make sense? How much better does it need to be to overcome the pain and cost (OPEX) of adopting and migrating to a whole new storage solution? How much more complex and costly is it to run a mixed storage environment with some all-flash, some tiered, and some capacity arrays?

In this insightful field report we’ve interviewed a half dozen real-world IT storage groups who faced those challenges, and with HPE 3PAR StoreServ have been able to easily transition important performance-sensitive workloads to all-flash storage. By staying within the 3PAR StoreServ family for their larger storage needs, they’ve been able to steer a clear, cost-effective and rewarding course to flash performance.

In each interview, we explore how they executed their transition from HDD to hybrid to all-flash under their real world IT initiatives that included consolidation, data center transformation, and performance acceleration. We’ll learn about the particular business values they are each successfully producing, and we will present some recommendations for others making all-flash storage decisions.

Adding small amounts of flash as cache or dedicated storage is certainly a good way to accelerate a key application or two, but enterprises are increasingly adopting shared all-flash arrays to increase performance for every primary workload in the data center.

If you are an existing customer of HPE 3PAR, this latest release of 3PAR capabilities will leave you smiling. If you are looking for an All Flash Array (AFA) to transform your data center, now might be the time to take a closer at HPE 3PAR. Since AFAs first emerged on the scene at the turn of this decade, the products have gone through various waves of innovation to achieve the market acceptance it has today. In the first wave, it was all about raw performance for niche applications. In the second wave, it was about making flash more cost effective versus traditional disk-based arrays to broaden economic appeal. Now in the final wave, it is about giving these arrays all the enterprise features and ecosystem support to completely replace all legacy Tier 0/1 arrays still in production today.

HPE 3PAR StoreServ is one of the leading AFAs on the market today. HPE 3PAR uses a modern architectural design that includes multi-controller scalability, a highly-virtualized data layer with three levels of abstraction, system-wide striping, a highly-specialized ASIC and numerous flash innovations. HPE 3PAR engineers pioneered this very efficient architecture well before flash technology became mainstream and proved that this architecture approach has been timeless by demonstrating a seamless transition to support all-flash technology. During this same time, other vendors ran into architectural controller-bound bottlenecks for flash, making them reinvent existing products or completely start from scratch with new architectures.

HPE’s 3PAR timeless architecture has meant that features introduced years before are still relevant today and features introduced today are available to current 3PAR customers that purchased arrays previously. This continuous innovation of features available to old and new customers alike provides the ultimate in investment protection unmatched by most vendors in the industry today. In this Technology Brief, Taneja Group will explore some of the latest developments from HPE that build upon the rich feature set that already exists in the 3PAR architecture. These new features and simplicity enhancements will show that HPE continues to put customer’s investment protection first and continues to expand its capabilities around enterprise-grade business continuity and resilience. The combination of economic value of HPE 3PAR AFAs with years of proven mission critical features promises to accelerate the final wave of the much-anticipated All-Flash Data Center for Tier 0/1 workloads.

Datrium, the leading provider of Open Convergence for cloud builders, today announced Datrium Blanket Encryption, an industry-first software product that combines always-on efficient deduplication and compression technology with high-speed, end-to-end encryption: in use at the host, in flight across the network and at rest on persistent storage.